The goal of syndromic surveillance is to rapidly detect early warning signs of disease trends that might impact the health of the public by monitoring for increases in the occurrence of specific symptoms and syndromes. By utilizing this type of pre-diagnostic data, syndromic surveillance enables earlier detection of disease trends and outbreaks and, therefore, more rapid interventions to interrupt the spread of illness in the community.

Louisiana Early Event Detection System (LEEDS) is a web-based reporting system that automatically processes hospital Emergency Department and Urgent Care data to identify visits indicative of specific syndromes tracked by the Louisiana Office of Public Health (OPH).

LEEDS tracks numerous syndromes and is used by Infectious Disease Epidemiology for important public health serveillance activities including:

Foodborne, waterborne, and other gastrointestinal illness outbreak detection and surveillance